Last time I was in France I was impressed by their latest road safety scheme. Almost life-size black cut-outs of human figures are springing up at accident sites, one for each person killed, with a slash of blood red across the face.
I found these macabre reminders highly effective. Being dark and not too big they don't despoil the countryside; unlike speed cameras and speed limit signs they don't make you drive along with your eyes glued to the speedometer instead of the road ahead; but they certainly make you think. Each time I saw one - or, worse still, a family group with small child-size figures - I wondered what about this particular stretch of road was so dangerous, what was really the most appropriate speed, and how an accident could have occurred at this spot. I'm convinced they made me drive with even greater care than usual, and that of course is their intended purpose.
So when Bert Morris, the Director of the AA Trust which is a road safety charity funded by the Automobile Association, called this week for the introduction of these figures in the UK, I found myself in complete agreement. What a great idea, I thought.
Then I read further. What were Mr.Morris's reasons for wanting these figures? Was it because of their thought-provoking nature? Was it because they would cause us to wonder how such an accident could have happened, and thus be forewarned against repeating it?
Well, no. It was because "the signs would drive home the dangers of speeding and could reduce the number of prosecutions". Mr.Morris went on to say "Many drivers cannot accept speed limits because they can't see the point. We need to tell them why the limit and the camera are there …."
So here we go again. Only this time it's not the so-called road safety experts or the scamera partnerships that are claiming a god-like omniscience, it's an organ of an association that ought to be supporting drivers by engaging in some proper joined-up thinking about a vital issue that affects us all - keeping alive. But no, once again we have the unthinking assumption that because "they" have decided to place a speed-limit on a certain road, any driver who believes that limit is inappropriate must automatically be wrong.
Sadly, if these people were as all-knowing as they think they are, their efforts would have borne some fruit by now. Speed-limits on UK roads have blossomed by many hundreds of percent, prosecutions have grown to epidemic proportions (680% increase, as we say elsewhere in these pages), average traffic speeds have slowed by 5% - and the fatal accident rate has stayed exactly the same. In other words, we've done what they wanted and it's made not a scrap of difference!
The same newspaper report went on to say that "accident data from 850 of the nation's main roads show the highest-risk routes were most frequently single carriageways through rural, hilly areas, while motorways had the lowest accident rate". God, it makes you think, doesn't it, this incisive scientific insight? One furrowed brow, a quick flip through some accident statistics and a flash of omniscience reveals something we all knew years ago - bendy roads are more dangerous than straight ones! I can hardly contain my admiration.
When are these gods of intellect going to accept the fact that excessive speed is not, according to the police, the main cause of accidents? That in fact, at 7.3% of all accidents it comes well down the list of common faults? When will they accept that, again according to police figures, only 4% of accidents are directly caused by failure to observe the speed limit? And that of the 7.3% of accidents that are caused by excessive speed, in as many as a quarter the driver was still within the speed limit? When will they realise that the biggest single cause of accidents is driver inattention, and stop distracting us with their unnecessary speed limits, their cameras, their cautionary signs and all the other things they do to make themselves important and keep them in work?
So, Mr.Morris, you're perilously close to being our "Wanker of the Week" for your narrow-minded, self-righteous words. The only thing that saves you from this ignominious fate is that the measures you're advocating would actually be the best road safety idea this country has had in the last thirty years.
Of course, you copied the idea off the French in the first place …..
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
This site created and maintained by PlainSite